Daily Archives: October 1, 2014

Graf awarded the Beth Prize!

In August, Thomas Graf (Ph.D. 2012, now at Stony Brook) was awarded the Beth Prize for best dissertation in Logic, Language and Linguistics for 2013, which includes a cash prize and publication offer. Read more about the Beth Prize here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._W._Beth_Dissertation_Prize

Congratulations Thomas!

New NSF grant for Keating and colleagues

(repost from department’s news feed)

A new UCLA project by the self-styled “Voice Science Consortium” – Abeer Alwan (Electrical Engineering), Jody Kreiman (Head & Neck Surgery) and Pat Keating – has been awarded $200,000 for the year beginning August 1. The project, “Variance and Invariance in Voice Quality” aims to better understand how voices vary both within and between people. The primary research question of the project is this: Under normal daily life variability, how often does a person sound less like him- or herself and more like someone else? A database of 200 UCLA undergraduates, performing a variety of speech tasks across multiple recording sessions, will be collected in the Phonetics Lab. An acoustic “voice profile” for each speaker will be calculated, and an overall space across all the speakers derived. The location and variability of each speaker’s voice relative to all the other speakers will allow predictions about how confusable different voices should be. Initial work on the project has already begun, with help from Henry Tehrani (department engineer), Anya Mancillas (department lab coordinator) and Brenda Garcia (undergraduate research assistant).